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Weaver Ant Quiz


 Kingdom: Animalia

 Phylum: Arthropoda

 Class: Insecta

 Order: Hymenoptera

 Family: Formicidae

 Genus: Oecophylla

 

 


Weaver ants (genus Oecophylla) are social insects belonging to the ant family, known for their communication and nest building behavior. They belong to the genus Oecophylla. Weaver ants are social insects that have complex bio-chemical communication and make elaborate nests out of living tree-leaves. Weaver ants are found in the tropical forests of Africa and southeast Asia. They are colored a shade of red and are known for their painful, irritating sting.


 


Weaver ants form the most elaborate communicative organization in the insect world. They form complex organizations through their simple intelligence to emerge as an elaborate social structure. At first the queen ant lays her eggs among tree leaves while the worker ants engage in building the nest. This emergent ant society helps in building the nest by weaving together living tree leaves. This is done by first forming ant chains that hold together leaves and then manipulating the ant larva to produce silk in order to glue the tree leaves. Thus the ant colony emerges with the queen in the center of the nest whose only purpose is to lay eggs while female ants engage in building the nest. The entire nest building activity is a very distributed process involving every ant.

The emergence of complex organization among Weaver ants, from simple biological intelligence is a model for social communication processes in organizations and artificial intelligence. It is extensively modeled and studied in the emergence of complex behavior from simple rules in diverse disciplines of generative sciences. The Weaver ants emergent organization and eating behavior is applied as natural bio-control of pests in orchards, where they are introduced on trees in order to build nests and act as natural pest control.

 

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